Posts Tagged ‘strange’

I was upstairs this morning, trying to put away some laundry, when I head blood-curdling screams coming from downstairs where the kids were playing. Fearing some horrible scene awaiting my discovery, I bolted down to the living room.

From Wikipedia.

To my surprise, the kids both had huge grins on their faces as they ran back and forth across the living room, shrieking at the top of their lungs all the while.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Playing screaming,” our three year-old answered matter-of-factly, as though this should have been completely obvious.

The Cosgrove CD was a Christmas present from the grandparents to our three year-old son, while the Neubauten album is something I’ve had in one format or another for many years.

That a couple of preschoolers would enjoy listening to treacly tween pop isn’t the least bit surprising, but their enjoyment of Einstürzende Neubauten is only surprising until you stop and think about it for a moment:

What do toddlers and early preschoolers enjoy doing? Banging and scraping stuff together loudly, especially if they’re metal pots and pans, with occasional random screaming.

What has Einstürzende Neubauten made a career out of doing? Banging and scraping stuff together loudly, with occasional screaming.

Add the two together, and of course little kids are going to like avant-garde German industrial music from the mid 1980s. They haven’t had the chance to form a preconceived opinion that it’s strange yet; all they know is that it sounds kind of like what they like doing anyway.

Add processed pop music targeted at kids to the mix, and they’re all over it — which is how we ended up with Einstürzende Cosgrove playing in the living room, over and over again, all morning. To them, that isn’t weird at all. I, on the other hand, was ready to curl up into a little ball muttering, “Can’t sleep – clowns will eat me,” by lunchtime.

I can’t help but wonder what a DJ mashup of the two albums would sound like, if only for the entertainment value provided by potential track titles like “Kissin’ Yü-Gung” or “Shakespeare Brennt.”

There have been some extra weird search engine queries taking people to this site over the last week:

“Turkey bidet toilet combo” — As much as it baffles me that someone would be scouring the Internet for this word combination, I was even more confused by my inability to recall ever having used the word “bidet” here. It turns out my memory was wrong: here it is, from November 2008. The same post begins by mentioning High School Musical. I must have a sicker mind that I previously believed.

Continuing with the international theme, “German Slanket” — I’m not sure what would make a Slanket German. Would it be in the colors of the German flag, or would it yell, “MACH SCHELL!” if you don’t flip through channels using your TV remote quickly enough?

“Pennsylvania Dutch food humor” — Exhibit A: Scrapple. Exhibit B: Cup Cheese. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t actually eat any of those things; we just like seeing tourists wince at the sight of them. The funniest of all are the tourists who decide to be brave and eat them; the joke’s on you, folks.

“Chemistry funny” — Yes, chemistry is very funny. I found balancing chemical equations to be a delightful hoot in high school.

From Cafepress.com

“Chupacabra crossing signs” — I never thought of such a thing before seeing those words together just now. Now, having seen them, I’m not sure how it’s possible for my life to go on without one. I MUST HAVE A CHUPACABRA CROSSING SIGN FOR MYSELF!

“Quotes about long winded stories” — I once knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy’s cousin who’s twice-related sister-in-law’s mother’s daughter knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who once said something about Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. But to put it into proper context, we’ll have to go back to the War of the Austrian Succession . . .

“Mechanical parrots” — Unlike the chupacabra crossing sign, these are things I could really do without.

“The best Yugo” — Speaking of things I don’t want . . .

“la-veterana@hotmit.liver” — This can’t possibly be a legit email address, unless the nation of hepatitis has its own domain now.

So there’s a rundown of some of the search terms that have brought some really twisted people to this site over the past week. Luckily for them, I’ve been twisted enough to have somehow created content that would send them here in the first place.

Thanks to this post, it’s only a matter of time before I start getting hits for “hepatitis” combined with something else weird, too. Now that I think about it, “nation of hepatitis” is a weird enough phrase on its own.

What would be the most utterly revolting restaurant name ever? I vote “The Hepatitis Bidet.”

I was driving to my parents’ house, my car loaded with groceries, when I noticed something out of the ordinary in their neighborhood. A very large, very misshapen, vaguely anthropomorphic deer was weaving from house to house, knocking on front doors. Strangely, the neighborhood seemed to be abandoned.

I didn’t think anything of it as I pulled into the garage and closed the door behind me. While unloading the groceries in the house, my parents’ parrot began squawking, “BRAAAAK, Something’s not right, BRAAAAK!”

“When did they get a parrot,” I wondered.

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head, from Wikipedia

There was a knock on the door a moment later. From a slight part in the dining room curtains, I could see a large deer that looked like the love child of a muppet and Richard III. I didn’t answer the door.

“Umm… Hey,” a strangely nerdy-sounding voice emanated from within the hulking, hunchbacked deer muppet, its google eyes flailing wildly. “Uhh, Dwayne De Rosario told me this was the place to get your ears waxed in sensory deprivation tanks, so I’m, umm, assimilating the whole bread loaf.

“Uhh, anyway, I’ll be around from now on… So, uhh, you’ll be seeing me, umm, around and stuff.” The deerlike creature staggered off across the street to another house, repeating the word “Brains” under its breath the whole way.

I shrugged it off and began putting away groceries. Soon, the dull thud of an enormous suctioned tentacle against the front door echoed through the house. Another surprisingly dorky voice came from the direction of the door.

“Hi. This is Sid. Uhh, Sid The Octopus. I was sent here by Toby Keith Urban Outfitters to elevate your coffee to the fourth plane… Anybody home? … No? … Well, I’ll, uhh, just leave the dominoes on the front porch. Tally ho!”

By this time I’d gone upstairs. I glanced down at the backyard from a second story bedroom window, and I could see a gigantic, green ostrich with burning red eyes doing neck rolls on the back porch, and a huge gorilla skulking across the back yard.

And the moral of this story is to never eat string cheese just before bedtime.

Like this:

One would think that the good people of Gävle, Sweden would have gotten the hint by now. Their 43 foot high straw Yule/Christmas goat was just set alight yet again. It’s been burned down 24 times since the first goat was erected in 1966. That one was burned down, too. The goat has also suffered dismemberment and was once even run over with a car. Here’s the news report from when it was burned in 2005 as well.

Even weirder, the goat’s penultimate tweet was tangentially related to Tiger Woods: “Elin Nordegren (still married to T Woods) might be on her way to Gävle to celebrate Christmas with her mom at the castle. Twin sister here!”

Still, the goat seems to have a sense of humor about its travails, having also tweeted, “Santa Claus and a ginger bread guy set me on fire a few years ago – using flaming arrows. The competition is hard!”

I don’t know about you, but I would have gladly paid to see Santa Claus and a gingerbread man shoot a giant straw goat full of flaming arrows.

Maybe it’s time that Gävle takes a different approach to the goat’s struggle to exist. Embrace the annual arson. Turn it into a festival. Just imagine: BURNING GOAT!

I haven’t the slightest idea in what language the skeevy-looking puppets below are supposed to be singing, let alone what they’re singing.

For all I know, what they are singing could be horribly offensive and/or utterly obscene in any panoply of ways, and I apologize in advance if that is the case. It appears that may in fact be the case, since the puppets impressively manage to name-drop both Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade within five seconds of the other.

All I know for sure is that it seems to be from somewhere in Eastern Europe, that it is set to the tune of “Summer Nights” from Grease, and that I couldn’t stop laughing as it played.

I was standing on what was supposed to be the set of High School Musical — Disclaimer: I have never seen, nor will I ever see, any of the High School Musical movies, so help me every deity, archetype, divinity, universal mind, metaphor, symbol, spiritual tuning fork, collective unconscious, etc. in which anyone has ever believed or will ever believe — in last night’s dream. The set was a drab, brown and gray dominated anonymous high school all-purpose room/auditorium. In fact, it appeared to be the actual drab all-purpose room of an actual random high school in all its faded glory.

In an overdose of meta-twists, I was there to help oversee auditions for a high school’s musical reproduction of a high school’s musical reproduction of High School Musical. The problem was that I’d just received word that one of the other people helping with the casting was someone I was trying to avoid, since I really didn’t have three hours or so to listen to the person yammer endlessly about whatever mind-blowingly stupid thing they just did in their life, followed by a lengthy bloviation about whatever mind-blowingly stupid scheme they were planning to put into action next.

So, I was trying to hide.

I was about to duck into the boys’ bathroom down the hall from the auditorium when I noticed the adjacent door to the faculty lounge bathroom was slightly ajar. Intrigued for some reason, I entered.

A Pod Chair.

The luxurious marble room was full of spacey pod chairs, except they were also combination toilet-bidet-baths. There were about 40 of the pod chairs in the room, and about half of them were occupied by naked men smoking cigars and drinking whiskey on the rocks in low-ball glasses. The music of Charlie Parker played softly in the background as they conversed with one another from their respective toilet-bath-pods. Marble sculptures were scattered throughout the room as well, and steam hung in the air.

Deciding I needed to use the facilities, I walked over to one of the empty toilet pod chairs and discovered a towering pile of excrement festering in it. I walked to the next pod only to discover the same thing, and on and on it went until I checked every free toilet pod, and all of them were full of crap to the brim.

At this point I decided to flush one of the toilets, but only some of the waste matter therein vanished; most of it remained. One of the men said, “It’s either you or the pile.” So I flushed again, and a little more disappeared into the plumbing. After four more flushes, the poop was finally gone.

I sat in the pod and relaxed with my complimentary cigar and glass of whiskey, I and felt the pod’s cool water flow down my lower back while Bird wailed on the sax. “This is frickin’ nice,” I thought. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized that for whatever reason I wasn’t going to be able to do my business in this lap of luxury, and that I would have to get up and go back to the urinals in the cruddy boys’ restroom instead.

It was at that moment that I woke up and discovered that I was laying on my side and facing the middle of the bed. The covers had been pulled away from me and off my backside, and my t-shirt was bunched up, exposing my lower back to the air. I did in fact have to go to the bathroom.

Always willing to beat a dead horse (or, I guess in this case, dead turkey), I decided to re-post a video of an interview with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin here that I saw on another blog. One of the commenters of the original video posting on YouTube said, quite accurately, “This is like watching a David Lynch movie.”

When I watched the video, I had the sound turned down since the kid was sleeping next door. Somehow, I think having the sound off made the experience of watching the clip with the prior expectation of it somehow being like a David Lynch movie even funnier in its own incredibly dark and twisted manner. All I’ll say is keep watching the creepy guy in the background.

We’ve all seen personal grooming kits for ear hair and nose hair — such kits trim those hairs. Perhaps it is time for an ear and nose hair grooming kit that takes a different approach.

And so, it is with pride that we unveil The Ear & Nose Hair Beauty Kit! Instead of cutting off your ear and nose hair, make them attractive focal points of your overall appearance! Use our tiny tweezers to braid and tie little bows into your ear hair! Make tiny pigtails hang from your nose with our nasal scüncis! Blondes have more fun — color your ear hair with our new hair coloring kits! Can’t grow a moustache, but have lots of nose hair? Use our gel to turn it into a little hanging handlebar moustache! REDEFINE HANDSOME! THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!